The Ranieri Bride

Try stopping him, Freya thought with a shiver as she recalled the way Fredo’s strong arms had secured her son once already that day.

‘He just stands in a corner of the playroom watching him and scaring the rest of us half to death,’ Cindy went on. ‘Have you seen him, Freya? He’s built like a gorilla! I want the scary thing out of my crèche!’

‘Right,’ Freya said, beginning to shake all over again. ‘Is—is Nicky scared of him, too?’

‘Are you joking? Your son had the bold cheek to go right up to him and say, “Hi, monkey, want to come and play?” Does Nicky know him?’

Now, there was a question. How did she answer it—no or yes? If she said no, she would put everyone involved in the crèche into a panic. If she said yes, she was setting herself up for more questions she had no way of answering.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ she replied, going for the sidestep response.

What did Enrico think he was doing? she wondered helplessly as she put down the phone. Was he trying to intimidate her through Nicky before he’d even—?

‘Your tea break, Freya,’ a frosty voice intruded. ‘Though the way you’ve been stuck on that phone all afternoon I’d say you’ve already had the equivalent of several of them.’

Freya blinked, green eyes looking blankly at her head of department, a cool creature with dyed blonde hair and a tight pink mouth, who loved ruling over everyone like a tyrant.

‘Be so good as to keep your personal life out of my department in future, if you don’t mind.’

The woman was also miffed because, like everyone else, she’d asked Freya the same eager questions, only to receive the same stock, frustratingly unrevealing answers.

‘Yes. Sorry. Right,’ Freya mumbled—then she grabbed her bag and ran.

She had to talk to Enrico, and she had to do it now! Unearthing her mobile phone from her bag the moment she hit the outer corridor, she leant back against the wall and dialled into Hannard’s via Reception. Her fingers were still tense, her insides shaking. She didn’t want to speak to him but if she had to do it, then it was better over the phone than face-to-face.

She managed to get as far as his personal assistant—a male personal assistant—who coldly informed her that Ranieri was in conference. Since Freya had once occupied the same post, she knew exactly what ‘in conference’ really meant. Enrico was talking to no one. He was too busy plotting her demise, no doubt.

‘Look,’ she said impatiently, too stressed and in need of sorting this situation out to play word games, ‘I need to speak to him urgently, so you will tell him that Freya will call back in five minutes and even if he is still in conference I’m coming right up!’

With that she severed the connection, not wanting to hear what the PA had to say to that piece of defiance. Then she shot off to the ladies’ room to use the next five minutes to freshen up.

Enrico received the message with his handsome face cut from granite. So she was panicking already. Good, he thought grimly. He wanted her to panic. He wanted her to live in fear for her life.

Freya had to wait in line for a cubicle. By the time she’d bagged one her five minutes were almost up and the panic Enrico was hoping for was really setting in. Quickly dragging her phone out of her bag, she rang into Hannard’s again.

It didn’t help that it took almost another two minutes to make the connection with his PA. There was a queue a mile long waiting to use the ladies’, and sitting there with her panties stretched taut across her knees and a mobile telephone clamped to her ear felt pretty damn weird to say the least.

‘I will put you through now, Jenson,’ that cold male voice informed her.

The man knew her name, which made her stomach lurch because Enrico must have told him. What else had he said? Who else had he spoken to here about her?

‘I want you to leave me alone, Enrico,’ she rushed out in a driven whisper the moment the connection was made. ‘My son is not your son, so call off Fredo!’

‘Why are you whispering?’ he demanded.

‘I’m trying to talk seriously to you without half the building hearing me!’ she unleashed in an unsteady, husky hiss. ‘You can’t do this to me, Enrico. You can’t just stroll into my life and take it over. You can’t…’

Someone knocked on the cubicle door. ‘You all right in there?’ a female voice questioned. ‘You’ve been in there for an age!’

‘In where for an age?’ Enrico rasped out.

‘In the loo,’ Freya answered impatiently. ‘I’m in one of the loos because it happened to be where I was when my five minutes were up.’

‘The loo,’ he repeated, then went perfectly silent.

Freya plucked tensely at the lacy edge of her panties while she waited for him to recover from the shock. ‘We all need it some time, Enrico,’ she sighed out eventually. ‘Even you.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ he gritted. ‘You are speaking to me on this phone while sitting on the loo?’